Cats learn to manipulate people? Stop the frickin’ presses.

The Silicon Alley Reporter (much as I hate to plug it) carries a story today saying that Ziff Davis is planning to create a $400 newsletter tracking Microsoft. It’ll be written by Mary Jo Foley, one of the best Microsoft reporters around and an editor at Ziff’s new Baseline magazine. Editorially, I’m sure it’ll be a whiz-bang success.

The thing is, Ziff is good at selling inexpensive magazines (the newsstand model) and it’s good finding the right people to give them away to (the controlled circulation model). For a while, it was in the business of selling expensive trade show admissions. But what it’s never shown itself to be good at is selling big-ticket newsletters.

I speak from some experience here. I worked on a project at Ziff that consisted of a series of one-price-fits-all newsletters/websites/seminars. Our price out of the gate was $1000. Ziff tried to sell our product, at first, solely through e-mail with a respond-to website that cost thousands to develop. It didn’t really work. Then they tried a card mailing — about the cheapest and fastest way possible to get into the mail. That didn’t work either.

After a few months, they killed the project. It’s not that the product wasn’t good; it’s that no one ever found out. When’s the last time you spent $1000 on the basis of a couple of e-mails and a website?

I’ve actually been doing this for a while. I published my first newsletter online in 1985. That same year, Esther Dyson launched one backed by Bill Ziff. They charged $1000. I charged by the article; I don’re remember how much,  but it was lots less. Neither of us lasted, but I bet I made more money than they did.

The newsletter business is different than the magazine business, which doesn’t mean that Ziff won’t make a buck or two. It just means that it’ll be harder and more expensive than they probably think. And as good as Mary Jo is, it’s going to be hard to demonstrate in these tough times that she can provide better and faster information than what can be had floating around for free — including what her own company is producing.

From the AP:

Record Crowd Reaches Top of Everest. The top of the world was crowded Thursday, with a record 54 people making it to the summit of Mount Everest, including the grandson of one of the first two men to conquer it in 1953.

This makes me nervous. Not in any personal sense, but if I recall correctly, it was this kind of crowding that led to the disastrous day recounted in Into Thin Air.

A new study indicates that 6-month-old babies are better at face recognition than 9-month-olds — if the face in question is a monkey. After that, kids apparently realize that it’s human faces that count.

“As people get older, they get better and better at detecting the subtle differences in the faces they see a lot: human faces, Nelson said. But at the same time, they lose the ability to detect differences in things they don’t see a lot.”

As the dad of 5-month-old twins, this comes as a relief. Not that the kids seem to be having any trouble as it is…

Not that so many of you were using it, but I’ve just installed the YACCS commenting software. Please feel free to play with it.

Previously, I was using Radio’s built-in engine, which is based on Userland’s Manila site-management tool. Trouble is, the built-in software didn’t give me any control over comments posted on the log. Someone could have come in and posted really offensive or off-topic stuff and I’d have had no way to manage it. That’s a Bad Thing, and something that Userland really ought to fix.

YACCS gives me much more control over the entire comments process — control I doubt I’ll ever need, but have to have it in case it ever comes to that.

About a year ago, Microsoft introduced the idea of something called .Net My Services — an ill-defined collection of sort-of-business-related online services. Customers didn’t bite.

Now, CNet says, Microsoft is planning to incorporate My Services into its next version of Office, its near-monopoly application bundle. (You know: Word, Excel, Powerpoint.) The company tried something similar in the current version of Office, Office XP (not to be confused with Windows XP, which is an operating system and not application software — as if Microsoft wanted you to be able to tell them apart).

Office XP has something called Smart Tags, an interesting innovation that actually gives you a lot of control over how your text is formatted. But the initial release of Smart Tags let Microsoft do things like take an address and send it to a Microsoft-owned web site that could map it, or take an e-mail address and with one click automatically link to a Microsoft-owned e-mail service. Supposedly, any vendor could write code that would send users to their own site, but guess which company had their hard-wired?

Anyway, there were predictable screams and Microsoft backed off that particular application of Smart Tags. It now looks like they’ll be back for another pass.

And speaking of nefarious, Microsoft is also in the midst of rejiggering the way it licenses software to big companies. Apparently, many companies will see their software costs jump, and an important deadline is looming. This is why Sun Microsystems has released a paid (read: supported) version of its Office-compatible application package StarOffice.

StarOffice had been free, but without manuals or real support. Corporations have a hard time dealing with free software — and with reason. If you build your business around a piece of software, it’s important to know a) who it’s from, b) that it’ll be around tomorrow. Sun’s charging even the nominal $79 indicates that StarOffice may actually become a business — and apparently, clients are sniffing around. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

From CNN:

The carrot is to return to its roots when it goes on sale in what’s said to be its true colour of purple this summer.

Growers say they have dug up the vegetable’s original colour and will revert to the new hue this summer for the first time in Europe in five centuries.

It’s not April 1. I checked.

One slow July 4 weekend when I was with UPI, the Hartford, CT bureau produced a story about a farmer who had grown a crop of red white and blue pickles. They’d picked the story from a local weekly. The regional bureau in Boston thought this was a terrific story and made it available to all UPI clients in New England, as well as alerting the national and international desks in New York.

While those desks were pondering this item, the Photo desk realized that they really need a picture of these pickles to move on the wire. So Photo asked Boston, which asked Hartford, which got on the phone to the weekly, which got on the phone to the stringer who wrote the original article: the UPI Photo desk in New York thinks this is a terrific story and they want a picture to send to their clients around the world.

You’re k idding, the stringer said. It was a put-on. Who the hell believes you can grow red white and blue pickles?

The retraction stories were entertaining.

And somehow, no one got fired.

This is just way cool. My friend Mike Elgan found the world’s smallest metronome — the Korg MetroGnome.

It’s a bud headphone that hangs in your ear. Weighs two-tenths of an ounce. Won’t bug the neighbors or other musicians.

I have no idea how well it works, but the gadget value is off the scale.

From The New York Times:

Dr. Hugh Francis Hicks, a dentist whose fascination with light bulbs is said to have begun when his mother tossed one into his crib and culminated in his owning 60,000 bulbs, died on May 7 in Baltimore. He was 79.

<snip>

Not infrequently, patients had to wait as he welcomed people interested in seeing what he identified as the biggest and smallest light bulbs in the world ÷ to say nothing of the floodlights used in an Elvis Presley movie or the headlamps from Hitler’s Mercedes-Benz.

The dumb bastards killed another one. PC Computing is finally dead. Ziff killed it yesterday.

PCC had been troubled from the start, about 10 years ago. It began as a technology magazine that was more about computing than computers — a difficult distinction that company execs and advertisers didn’t get. That iteration lasted not very long at all.

Lesson learned, PCC re-invented itself pretty much every year to 18 months, becoming the magazine for the latest buzzword. This required the circulation — which eventually reached 1 million — to constantly churn, since readers who cared about laptops may well not care about multimedia. As a place to catch excess ad dollars floating around the market, however, it worked brilliantly. Big circ, constantly changing market looking for visibility, perfect. Replacing the circulation was expensive, though, and the title never made much of a profit.

Editorially, it was quite good. Bright layouts, strong voice, the least geeky by far of all the major titles. But one was never entirely quite sure what the magazine was about.

Things reached a nadir about two years ago. Ziff Davis, which was then owned by Softbank, agreed to sell to the investment bank Willis Stein. Between the agreement and the actual sale, and apparently without consultation with the new owners, some genius decided to change the name and focus of the magazine. PC Computing became Smart Business, which was a problem because there already was a Smart Business magazine.

Instead, PCC became “Smart Business for a New Economy,” and then “Ziff Davis’s Smart Business.” As the title might suggest, if you read that far, it was a New Economy magazine. Except it wasn’t. Not really. It was sort of a cross between PC Magazine and Business 2.0, and may have turned out to be to techie for business types and too soft for techies.

But the real problem with the mag wasn’t editorial. It was the lack of a core identity. There was, finally, no There there. Screw with a product enough and people will eventually turn away.